A FORMER Goldman Sachs lobbyist who now works as the top lawyer for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declined to name 19 of his 20 former clients in his financial disclosure last year.
Mark Patterson, who also served as former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff during the Obama administration, joined Schumer’s office last year. He had been a co-chair of the Perkins Coie law firm’s public and strategic affairs practice since 2014.
An archived version of Perkins Coie’s website, directly below, says that Patterson provided “policy analysis and strategic counsel to clients such as major corporations, financial institutions and nonprofit organizations.” He gave few specifics in his 2018 financial disclosure, asserting that he had to withhold the identities of nearly all of his clients based on rules of professional conduct for lawyers.
Mark Patterson
#perkinscoiesucks
Mark A. Patterson was Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury under Secretaries Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew. He is the longest-serving Chief of Staff in Treasury Department history, and is a recipient of the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Department’s highest honor. As co-leader – with Pete Rouse – of the firm's Public and Strategic Affairs Group, he provides policy analysis and strategic counsel to clients such as major corporations, financial institutions and nonprofit organizations. Mark advises business leaders and other clients on federal and state policy issues, crisis management and related public communications challenges. A lawyer with extensive leadership experience in government and the private sector, Mark served for many years as a senior staff member in the U. S. Senate, where he worked as Policy Director for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Prior to that, he was an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan for more than a decade. He held several positions on Senator Moynihan’s staff, including Democratic Staff Director and Chief Counsel at the Senate Committee on Finance, where Moynihan was the Ranking Democrat. Mark was Senator Moynihan’s longest-serving chief aide on the Finance Committee. MOREProfessional Leadership
A Schumer spokesperson did not respond to questions.
At Schumer’s office, Patterson is now at the center of a fight over corporate governance. Since President Donald Trump took office, organizations like Demand Progress and the Revolving Door Project have pressured Schumer to use the limited powers at his disposal to encourage stricter oversight by recommending progressive watchdogs to regulatory agency boards. (Schumer, as minority leader, selects appointees for Democratic seats on regulatory bodies, who then need to be formally nominated by the White House).
The effort has produced mixed results: Although Schumer last year proposed nominees that progressives support, the White House didn’t nominate two of them, and Republicans didn’t hold votes on the other two nominees.
A coalition of 20 organizations recently wroteto Schumer demanding that he work to fill Democratic vacancies at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The letter faulted Schumer for allowing Trump’s judicial nominees to win confirmation by unanimous consent. Schumer could have used those vacancies as leverage to force votes on his party’s regulatory nominees, the progressives argued.
HuffPost this week called the fight over the regulatory bodies a “moment of truth” for Schumer and Senate Democrats. Jeff Hauser, who leads the Revolving Door Project in Washington, D.C., believes that Patterson deserves some blame for the botched vacancies. After Patterson was hired, Schumer’s office told The Nation that the former Goldman lobbyist — unlike his predecessor — wouldn’t be involved in vetting appointments to federal commissions. That’s a problem, said Hauser.
“I think we should in general try to not hire people for senior jobs where they’re going to be recused from certain matters,” Hauser said. “It would make sense that your chief counsel would be involved in the SEC and FDIC hiring process. It’s something you want your chief counsel to be involved in. If he is complying with his recusal, that might explain the relative indifference, because the senior person on leadership staff who should be raising alarms that these nominations are languishing with Trump is disempowered.”
Hauser said Patterson’s financial disclosure “illustrates a lot of the weakness in our ethics rules, because there is insufficient skepticism about self-reported matters.”
“We only have his word that those 19 clients required that level of confidentiality,” Hauser said. “If he’s hiding his clients, it’s hard to even know what we don’t want him involved in, by definition, because he’s preventing us the ability to know what is a conflict of interest.”
I know LeAnn Kirrmann says this is fake news, but have no fear, I have provided her with direct contact information to the Detroit FBI and Detroit Free Press to correct the record.
If you have any information about this story, please, reach out to the Detroit FBI 313-965-2323 or phoward@freepress.com.
Detroit needs more cocktails & popcorn because we are just getting started.
Paul Whelan of Novi, imprisoned in a czarist-era Russian prison on spy charges, would attract the notice of any seasoned intelligence team, a former CIA covert operations officer told the Free Press on Thursday.
"As long as there are nation states, there will be espionage. It is a very real threat and even more so today," said retired agent Valerie Plame, now an author who was famously outed as a spy during the second Bush administration.
"The Cold War was a bipolar world. We had one big enemy. Now, with the rise of nuclear terrorism, rogue nation states and a very active Russia and China, in the espionage realm," said Plame, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Plame, who noted she was a little sore from hiking the Grand Canyon, described an unpredictable international landscape where anything is possible and everything must be considered.
Whelan, 48, an executive with the auto parts manufacturer BorgWarner in Auburn Hills, was picked up by Russian authorities on Dec. 28 on suspicion of spying. His twin brother said the ex-Marine, whose military record included a larceny conviction, was in Russia for a friend's wedding. The Russians indicted Whelan on Thursday.
Russian media said Friday he was arrested in a Moscow hotel after receiving a flash drive with the names of workers at a classified security agency.
"There do seem to be real question marks around this story, at least in the public domain," Plame said. "That he was discharged from the military, from the Marines, dishonorably. That he's got this big interest in Russia; he travels there a lot. Huh? He's an auto parts guy? Really? I don't know. He could be completely innocent. The Kremlin could be trying to be provocative. Or there could be something there."
As a career CIA agent who can't safely confirm publicly the length of her undercover career, Plame said international threats are real. And Americans must take them seriously.
"By and large, I am quite alarmed at the intensity and depth that Russia has gone to disrupt all of our systems," she said. "They have sown chaos and they have done it really well. They have sown doubt in our electoral system. I think that is very serious. It goes to the very heart of our belief in our democracy and our way of life."
Plame expressed concern about America's ability to navigate the geopolitical situation with so much transition in Washington, including the government shutdown. She said the U.S. State Department has "really atrophied and really suffered under this presidency."
"For all we know, the people that might be in that office might not be reporting to work because of the government shutdown," Plame said.
She hoped that State Department officials were communicating regularly with the Whelan family.
"They're probably best advised to say nothing right now. The situation is so muddy that I think adding to it would be detrimental to Mr. Whelan's eventual release from captivity."
Is it possible he could be a spy? "It is not inconceivable," Plame said.
She noted, "There are many Americans that seek to serve their country in various ways. That's probably all I should say."
History of spying
Spy agencies in America have a history of relying on global companies to assist with intelligence collection, say historians who specialize in espionage.
To date, no evidence has been made public that ties Whelan to the CIA or the National Security Agency. The American, who had a work history in law enforcement, faces up to 20 years behind bars if convicted of espionage.
He has been a security specialist for the automotive parts supplier BorgWarner since 2017.
Previously, he worked for Kelly Services, a temporary staffing agency that touts itself as a “global leader” with an ability to place workers “in top companies across a variety of industries” across the world since 1968.
While BorgWarner has customers all over the world and employs 29,000 people in the U.S., Europe and Asia, none of the company's international sites is in Russia, said company spokeswoman Kathy Graham.
International analysts have suggested that Whelan is being held hostage by Russian President Vladimir Putin in hopes of negotiating the freedom of a Russian cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller in the ongoing investigation into U.S. election manipulation. Whelan is being held in Lefortovo detention center, built in the late 1800s and later used as a KGB prison.
Whelan was apprehended during a vacation trip, not work. Professionally, he is not responsible for cybersecurity nor was he in charge of industrial espionage duties as part of his job description.
He was responsible for the security of facilities, assets owned by the company and its people, Graham confirmed. Whelan did not work in information technology, Graham said.
In a 2013 deposition in an age discrimination suit against Kelly Services, he described his role this way: “Kelly Services is a global company, and we work with federal agencies all the time ... at the foreign embassies, or we work with HUD or DEA, FBI, ATF, whomever in the United States. We work with federal agencies in Canada, and what have you, all over the place. So we come in contact with federal agencies and officers all the time.”
'Whelan is being framed'
However, Chris Costa, executive director of the International Spy Museum, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., said, “My analysis suggests that this individual Paul Whelan is being framed” by Russia's Federal Security Service, known as FSB.
The spy museum collects and shares intelligence artifacts and stories to provide a global perspective on an all-but-invisible profession that has shaped history and continues to have a significant impact on world events.
“From a historical standpoint, whether we’re talking about the FSB or former KGB, our museum puts stories together that illustrate the cat-and-mouse game of counterintelligence,” he said. “The FSB is very, very pervasive and a solid security service. They’re very adept at dirty tricks."
Costa, like others nationally and internationally, including Plame, suggested that Putin could be "looking for leverage" in hopes of swapping the American for the Russian Maria Butina, who has pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of Russia.
“The Russians are going back to their playbook that they used throughout the Cold War. They’re very aggressive,” Costa said. “They’re taking shots at the United States.”
The claim that a businessman could actually work as a spy is not lost on fans of novelists John Le Carré or Robert Ludlum. History shows that the scenario is plausible.
Globally, corporations do passively work with intelligence services, Costa said. It may be a simple question during a crisis, and “of course, companies are going to cooperate in most cases.”
Not only have companies cooperated in the past, but they’ve been essential.
Finding people who can speak a foreign language fluently, cultivate cultural resources and develop social contacts was, and continues to be, important, said Professor Brian Hayashi, chairman of the Department of History at Kent State University in Ohio.
Whelan may be a logical target because he fits the profile, said Hayashi, author of an upcoming book being published by Oxford University Press about the little-known recruitment of Americans who were of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent who worked as U.S. spies during World War II.
The book documents corporate cooperation with the intelligence community, too.
“Western Union was heavily involved in the transmission of telegrams,” he said. “They were able to get different radio companies involved with American intelligence.”
The U.S. government would scan for coded messages in telegrams going abroad, particularly between Berlin and Tokyo, Hayashi said. “In some cases, they allowed for American intelligence to look at the telegrams.”
He continued, “American intelligence will go to various communications companies, in the past and even today, and try to get information.”
Missionaries as spies
Apart from formal cooperation, American intelligence can filter communications by capturing keyword searches and targets using technology.
“You never really know what’s going on,” Hayashi said. “We just don’t know.”
Top CIA agents have been journalists, religious missionaries and English teachers, he said. More and more, “sad to say,” nongovernmental organizations are included too — “the CIA may try to slip somebody in there.”
The automotive industry isn't immune, Hayashi said.
“It included one of the spies that the Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor to the CIA — used during World War II in China," he said. "One of the automotive executives went to China, and slipped in and was ostensibly working to re-establish the American car industry in China. In reality, he was there as an agent for the OSS.”
In that case, the agent double-crossed the U.S. to serve British interests. He was Canadian and his boss was an influential executive whose work led to the creation of the American International Group (AIG) in finance and insurance, Hayashi discovered.
More recently, the Daily Mail of Britain reported in August 2015 that "enemy spies" were attempting to recruit civil servants in a bid to steal Britain’s secrets by "befriending" them on LinkedIn, the social network site for hundreds of millions of professionals.
Secret agents working for countries including Russia and China created fake profiles on the site to lure unsuspecting victims, British intelligence warned.
News reports have noted that Whelan had an active Russian social media account and had connected with Russian soldiers.
These days, coverage of the Whelan case has inspired countless press calls to BorgWarner from throughout the U.S., England, Russia and France, Graham said.
News of the Russian police action didn’t actually surprise Hayashi, he said.
“I know something of the KGB — I had to deal with them in my book,” he said. “I can assure you, if the FSB is similar to its predecessor, the KGB, then the wider issue of Russian interference in American elections and politics is nothing new. The KGB had an entire section devoted to such activities. ... They got as high as the next prime minister of the Labour Party to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.”
Meanwhile, America hasn’t had a lot of trouble getting its own agents inside Russia because the new, younger generation opposes old-school KGB thinking that Putin, a former agent in the spy agency, represents, Hayashi said.
“I doubt Mr. Whelan was there to spy but, still, one does not know for sure without seeing any evidence," he said. "The likelihood is that he is innocent but happened to be in Russia at the wrong time. It is also possible he might have stumbled onto something accidentally and the Russians may want to cover that up.”
As it all unfolds, BorgWarner — which builds products that make vehicles move, from clutches and friction plates to transfer cases to turbochargers to electric motors and parts for combustion, hybrid and electric vehicles — is quietly awaiting the return of its executive.
Aaron Retish, a Wayne State University professor who has taught modern Russian and post-Soviet history for 16 years, is in England now, and watching the Whelan case.
It's unusual for the Russian government to arrest any American visiting the country on a tourist visa, Retish said.
Butina connection?
“Russia has arrested some people for coming in on a wrong visa or not registering. But this, the Russian media reports, was a spy sting," he said. "So something must have happened. Who knows? They’ve done this a couple of times with some U.S. diplomats and some British diplomats, but they were all eventually deported and not arrested.”
There is wide speculation that Whelan’s arrest in Russia could somehow be tied to Butina, who was trying to influence American political groups, including the National Rifle Association, but Retish said it’s too soon to make any such connection.
“I know that American news outlets have been trying to link the two, saying that this is some setup for a swap, but … there are so many other moving wheels,” Retish said, in the geopolitical landscape.
Butina, he noted, was not charged with espionage, which the Russian government alleges against Whelan.
“She was arrested for being a foreign agent," Retish said. "That makes it a lot different."
Comparisons are being made, he said, between Butina and the Russian spy Anna Chapman, who was arrested in the United States nearly a decade ago and pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges.
“She was a Russian woman who was married and living in the United States and was also kind of this classic spy. She was living the normal life, but she was also spying for Russia and then she was eventually caught,” Retish said. “Even her husband supposedly didn’t know about it. She was eventually released and came back to Russia for a while and became a celebrity. She was praised by Putin.
“That’s kind of where the similarities end between the two. Chapman was a spy. Butina was a foreign agent, an unregistered foreign agent. It could be eventually that Butina actually has more significance on the political field because of all the connections that she had, than Chapman. But that is the only other big swap that you had.
“This is just a weird case with Whelan because Putin just came out saying … he hoped to have neither conversation and a meeting with Trump. And you could see that there could be a potential upswing in U.S.-Russian relations, especially with the U.S. pulling out of Syria, which is also something that Putin praised.
“It’s an odd time to arrest someone, but you never know what is happening behind the scenes. This is also how Putin works. When you least expect it, something like this happens.”
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: phoward@freepress.com or 313-222-6512. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid. Free Press staff writer Kristen Jordan Shamus contributed to this report.
As the United States negotiated with Iran, one important U.S. interest
consistently remained off-limits: Iran would not be granted access to either the U.S.
financial system or the U.S. dollar. Foreign financial institutions were free to
conduct business with the government of Iran and Iranian entities, but U.S.
financial institutions continued to be barred from engaging Iran. Senior U.S.
government officials repeatedly testified to Congress that Iranian access to the U.S.
financial system was not on the table or part of any deal. This notwithstanding, the
U.S. Department of the Treasury, at the direction of the U.S. State Department,
granted a specific license that authorized a conversion of Iranian assets worth
billions of U.S. dollars using the U.S. financial system. Even after the specific
license was issued, U.S. government officials maintained in congressional testimony
that Iran would not be granted access to the U.S. financial system.
As a matter of fact, now that I am on the subject of House Ethics, I would be entirely pleasured if I could be in attendance for a House Oversight Committee hearing on the activities of House Ethics over the past 10 years.
We could invite the House Office of Compliance, and, oh, what the heck, let's subpoena House Judiciary, too!
I can walk around serving coffee, tea, or shots of tequilla, which may be a needed staple in these Oversight Committee hearings, when we find out what, exactly, these "Legal Geniuses" (trademark pending) have been doing...or not doing....like ignoring to complaints filed by a U.S. citizen, year after year after year about fraud.
House Speaker Paul Ryan removed Rep. Patrick Meehan from the House Ethics Committee on Saturday following a news report that the Pennsylvania Republican used thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to settle a sexual misconduct complaint against him by a former aide.
Rep. Patrick Meehan is seen in his official portrait for the 112th Congress.
Ryan told Meehan he must repay whatever taxpayer funds were used to settle the case and, although he has denied the allegations, be investigated by the Ethics Committee, Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong said in a statement Saturday.
“Speaker Ryan takes the allegations against Mr. Meehan very seriously,” Strong’s statement read. “The speaker is committed to rooting out sexual misconduct in the House and providing victims the resources they need.”
The statement added that the House is set to pass major bipartisan reform to the way the House handles claims of sexual harassment,” and the speaker will apply these new standards to the allegations made against Mr. Meehan.”
The former aide accused Meehan of making unwanted romantic advances toward her, and when she didn’t reciprocate, he grew hostile, according to the Times, which cited people familiar with her time in the office.
The former aide initiated a complaint with Congress’ Office of Compliance, began working from home and ultimately left her job, the Times reported. She later reached a confidential settlement paid from Meehan’s congressional office fund.
Meehan’s spokesman, John Elizandro, issued a statement saying the congressman denies the allegations.
“Throughout his career, he has always treated his colleagues, male and female, with the utmost respect and professionalism,” the statement read.
“In this case, the employee, represented by counsel, made certain assertions of inappropriate behavior, which were investigated,” Elizandro said. “With respect to resolving any allegation made against the office, Congressman Meehan would only act with advice of House Counsel and consistent with House Ethics Committee guidance. Every step of the process was handled ethically and appropriately. At Congressman Meehan’s request, the congressional attorneys handling the case have asked the complainant’s counsel to release all parties from the confidentiality requirements of the agreement to ensure a full and open airing of all the facts. The congressman is hopeful that they will agree to this request for full transparency.
“Rep. Meehan believes there must be real reform to the process for resolving complaints so that those who are truly wronged are given a fair forum to be heard and vindicated, and those accused are provided with an ability to respond to baseless accusations,” Elizandro’s statement continued. “The public to whom elected officials are answerable must be provided with a true sense of the facts and circumstances involved.”
Alexis Ronickher, who represented Meehan’s accuser, said in a statement that Meehan has asked her client to waive confidentiality “so he can deny well-grounded allegations knowing full well that his former staffer prizes her privacy above all else. Mr. Meehan demanded confidentiality to resolve the matter, presumably so that the public would never know that he entered into a settlement of a serious sexual harassment claim.”
“Now that it has become public — due to no fault of my client’s — he has flouted his legal obligations and is speaking publicly,” Ronickher said. “We will not allow our client to be victimized twice by this man. If he further violates the confidentiality strictures he insisted upon and he agreed to, he will leave our client no choice but to seek legal recourse on her behalf.”
The latest allegations against a sitting member of Congress surfaced the same week that a bipartisan group of House lawmakers unveiled a long-awaited plan aimed at tackling the way workplace complaints — including sexual harassment — are handled on Capitol Hill and holding lawmakers personally liable for settlements.
Under the current process, settlements reached after parties go through the Office of Compliance’s system are paid out through a US Treasury fund. However, the settlement between Meehan and his former aide was paid out of his office fund, not the Office of Compliance, according to the Times.
Sexual harassment and accusations of inappropriate behavior led to the departures of three lawmakers in recent months: Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat; Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican; and Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.
Franken, who left Congress earlier this month, has said that some of the allegations against him were “simply not true.”
Conyers settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 after allegedly sexually harassing a staffer.
Conyers denied wrongdoing in that case, but acknowledged that there had been a financial settlement to that complaint, before he announced his retirement.
Franks has denied ever having “physically intimidated, coerced, or had, or attempted to have any sexual contact with any member” of his congressional staff.
Several other lawmakers have abandoned re-election bids in light of accusations of harassment or misconduct, including Nevada Democratic Rep. Ruben Kihuen and Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold.
The House Ethics Committee launched investigations into Franks, Conyers, Farenthold and Kihuen.
Both Farenthold and Kihuen remain under investigation by the committee.
Kihuen has repeatedly denied allegations that he sexually harassed a female campaign staffer. Farenthold has denied engaging in regular verbal abuse of his staff.
A former local prosecutor, Meehan has been a vocal supporter of domestic violence victims. He is also a member of a bipartisan congressional task force to end sexual violence and has sponsored legislation requiring reporting of sexual violence.
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